Blastingnews: 250,000 Writers and 11 Million Readers. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

After 90 minutes of explaining how he built Blastingnews.com from the obscure content arm of an insurance price comparison website into Italy’s third most popular newspaper, Andrea Manfredi changes tack.

What, he asks, could possibly go wrong with this company that has in the space of little more than two years, amassed 250,000 writers who pen articles for an average of €8 ($8.70) apiece and 11 million unique monthly visitors?

Manfredi, 37, wants to know if there are any risks that he hasn’t thought of. New entrants, regulatory changes, a successful backlash from the traditional media? A scandal caused by inaccurate or even wholly misleading malevolent articles. Tragedies, deaths even, from irresponsible reporting? Closure because of ethical breaches or legal problems?

Are there any more, he asks. The entrepreneur thinks he has thought of everything but is anxious to make sure. It is quite a story.

Blastingnews.com was founded as Supermoneynews in 2012 in an attempt to boost the
Google rankings of Manfredi’s personal finance price comparison website Supermoney.eu, by adding content.

The future of journalism? Andrea Manfredi

Frustration With Traditional Media

Remembering his frustration at being rejected after university by Corriere della Sera, Italy’s second biggest newspaper, Manfredi, a former consultant, recruited ten freelance journalists to write about savings for the internet news site.

He gave them freedom to choose what they wrote about and paid them based on the numbers of readers reached.

Half of the journalists didn’t like the model and left but the others stayed and recommended Supermoneynews to their friends. Within three months, Blastingnews had 1,000 contributors.

“It was incredible. There was zero market investment. We didn’t do anything. People just came to us,” says Manfredi. “By June 2013, when Supermoneynews reached 2m unique visitors a month, the website had 3,500 contributors. That was when I went to Supermoney’s shareholders and said we had maybe found something that works.”

Supermoneynews was rebranded as Blastingnews and Manfredi broadened its categories, allowing writers, now called “Blasters” to write about topics including sport, television, politics, economics and business.

“That’s when we became a general magazine,” says Manfredi. “We have a lot of people who write for the fun of writing and they don’t earn a lot of money. Some people are much more professional and make a living out of it. In February, we paid some of our writers €4,000 for the month. We have just put in a ceiling of €150 per article so we don’t pay more than that but a lot of people, especially the more experienced ones, hit that ceiling. People can post various different types of content. They can post videos or report live on something.”

Manfredi believes Blastingnews’ success is down to it matching supply and demand for news and features with a style, tone and frequency that readers want. The website is also heavy on multiple coverage of a single topic. For example, while many publications ran a single article on International Women’s Day, Blastingnews published 50 different pieces about the subject.

This approach enables the website to reach a broader and more diverse audience, Manfredi argues. “It happens all the time like that,” he says. “We are able to write about what people want to read. Traditional media write about topics that readers don’t care about.

Blastingnews was spun off from Supermoney at the end of 2013 when it had 6m monthly visitors. Now, the website has 100,000 Blasters in Italy, with another 150,000 in 32 other countries, from Britain to Brazil and is just launching into the U.S. The medium-term plan is to reach 50 countries, with sites in English, Italian and Spanish.

Most of the readers are still in Italy. Indeed, as recently as July 2014, Blastingnews didn’t operate anywhere else. Now it has 8m monthly visitors within Italy and 3m elsewhere.

The growth has not been without controversy. Blastingnews’ model was investigated by Italian regulators amid concerns that it allowed the company to avoid paying social taxes. The company ended up being fined a few thousand euros. It is now run from outside Italy, across the border in Lugano, Switzerland, with smaller offices in London and California.

Manfredi owns 42 per cent of the holding company that owns Supermoney and Blastingnews but has just hired a chief executive for Supermoney, allowing him to focus on being chief executive of Blastingnews and is confident about the site’s prospects, denying that it is bad news for journalists.

Critics question the site’s quality, as Blastingnews, as Manfredi freely admits, takes on everyone who applies to write for it. However, he stresses that rigorous quality control is in place with every article having to be approved by one of the 150 freelance “senior Blasters” in the website’s crowdsourced newsroom. Blastingnews’ software also checks that the piece has not been published elsewhere and that it is grammatically correct.

The site is currently publishing 4,000 news stories a week, out of about 6,000 received. Blastingnews also takes articles off the site early if fewer than 40 percent of readers don’t read them to the end.

“The way we define quality is engagement,” says Manfredi. “We want people to click on the news, read all of it and take notice of it. If they don’t, in our opinion, it is not good news."

Manfredi also brushes away criticism that a site like Blastingnews can never break stories, only repeat them. While he accepts many of his Blasters don't have investigative skills needed to track down exclusives, he says the site is so popular that primary sources such as emergency service staff who see a news story go straight to blog on the site, rather than brief journalists.

"This is starting to work quite well with local news," says Manfredi. So such sources could eventually bypass newspapers altogether? "This is the final idea," he declares, "but it will require us to be a lot more advanced than we are now. We are perfectly made for primary sources."

Where will this blasting success end? Manfredi feels it has plenty of growth left in it and is not concerned that the brand will get diluted if its number of writers continues to grow at the existing pace.

“There’s no reason for us to stop people becoming Blasters,” he says. “What we need to do better and better is to fine-tune our properties and technology.

“The next target we have is to reach 10m monthly unique monthly visitors outside Italy. We believe we can reach that in about six months.”

Can crowdsourced news ever match the quality and depth of professional journalists? Is Blastingnews the end of journalism or its beginning? Do let me know your views.

I have been a business journalist for 27 years, working for The Daily Telegraph in New York as US Business Editor and in London as Associate City Editor. Specializing in interviews with chief executives and other major business figures, I am the author of "The Secrets of CEO...